Baidu is like a dandelion, the wind blows, and new AI companies have landed.
In 1969, at a conference of semiconductor engineers in Sunnyvale, an important town in Silicon Valley, 400 attendees from different companies found that 95 percent of them had worked for the same company.
The American bestseller Silicon Valley Fever highlights the company, writing: "There are about 70 semiconductor companies in Silicon Valley, and half of them are directly or indirectly descendants of it, and it has started an industry." ”
This company is known as the "cradle of talent in Silicon Valley" - Fairchild Semiconductor Company.
In the world, it is not uncommon for a steady stream of scientific and technological entrepreneurial talents like Fairchild to send scientific and technological entrepreneurial talents to the industry, and to strengthen the entire industry and even drive regional development. Among China's technology companies, the most significant "Fairy Child Effect" is Baidu.
It is often referred to as the "cradle of Chinese AI entrepreneurs". As a "transit mecca" for scientific and technological talents, Baidu has stepped out of a large number of outstanding AI financial entrepreneurs.
Most of these entrepreneurs are "Baidu graduates" who left from 2010 to 2015. They put on the halo of famous schools, step on the dividends of the times, respect and enthusiastically embrace technology, and are in awe and infinitely eager for China's infinite and vast market.
Compared with traditional financial institutions, their companies are still very young, but their methods of applying technology to solve business pain points are very sophisticated.
Looking back at the last decade of AI finance, we find that this group of entrepreneurs from Baidu has inadvertently changed the industry.
Ant Group (P11 expert) - Yang Zhenkun
Every double eleven, there must be a traffic battle, and since 2015, supporting all the transaction traffic of Alibaba double eleven, it has been OceanBase - it is Yang Zhenkun, who has polished Ant Financial's underlying distributed database OceanBase for ten years.
Before joining Ant to establish OceanBase, Yang Zhenkun was a senior scientist at Baidu and joined Baidu in September 2007 to design, develop and apply Baidu's autonomous cloud computing system.
In 2008, when Baidu and Google were entangled, Baidu set up two "experimental groups" to overcome the problem of distributed file systems, one of which was the Fengchao advertising system led by Yang Zhenkun.
In 2010, at the invitation of Alibaba partner Liu Zhenfei, Yang Zhenkun switched to Alibaba.
At that time, Ali found that Oracle-based database facilities were already difficult to support Taobao's huge transaction data. In order to completely reduce costs, Ali began to try to get rid of Oracle completely.
It was at this time that Yang Zhenkun took over the burden of developing distributed databases and founded OceanBase, which is also the world's first distributed relational database applied to the core business of finance.
In 2015, OceanBase completely replaced Oracle, supporting all transaction traffic of Alibaba Double Eleven. In 2019-2020, OceanBase broke the record for TPC-C testing and successfully surpassed Oracle's score.
On June 8, 2020, Ant Group announced that it will independently carry out corporate operation of its self-developed database product OceanBase. At present, OceanBase has also been exported to the outside world, serving large-scale projects of financial institutions such as ICBC and China Merchants Securities.
Prior to joining Baidu, Yang Zhenkun served as vice president of Founder Research Institute, deputy director of Peking University Computer Research Institute, chief researcher of Lenovo Research Institute, and chief researcher of Microsoft Research Asia Research.
CEO of 360 Mathematics - Wu Haisheng
Recently, 360 Digital Released the fourth quarter of 2020 financial report. According to the financial report, in 2020, 360 Digital Division achieved revenue of 13.564 billion yuan, an increase of 47.1% over 9.22 billion yuan in 2019.
Perhaps the most cheerful person to see this achievement is Wu Haisheng, CEO of 360 Mathematics.
Wu Graduated from the Communication University, Wu Haisheng received a bachelor's degree in media economics from the Communication University and a master's degree in communication from Peking University from 2005 to 2008.
After graduating in 2008, Wu Joined Baidu as a Product Manager in Baidu's User Products Department.
After leaving Baidu, Wu Haisheng also served as the director of Qihoo 360 Navigation Division, and was responsible for two important products of 360 Navigation and Film and Television.
At that time, Baidu, Ali and other Internet giants were doing financial business, and Wu Haisheng's 360 was no exception.
In March 2015, Shenzhen, Wu Haisheng showed the 360 founder Zhou Hongyi a detailed business plan, Zhou Hongyi was very interested, the two kept talking about two o'clock in the middle of the night, and finally made a decision to let Wu Haisheng come out alone to do finance.
360 Finance finally landed on the NASDAQ in December 2018, and upgraded the brand to "360 Digital" in August 2020, and Wu Haisheng continued to serve as the CEO of 360 Digital.
Just this week, 360 Digital Science released the 2020 annual financial report, Wu Haisheng said in the financial report that this year will seize the historical opportunity to raise the company's scale and quality to a new height.
The fourth paradigm - Dai Wenyuan, Chen Yuqiang, Hu Shiwei
Earlier this year, AI platform and technology service provider Fourth Paradigm announced the completion of a $700 million Series D funding round.
Since its establishment in 2015, in the ten rounds of financing completed by the fourth paradigm, investors not only have five major banks in the country of Qi, but also the National Manufacturing Transformation and Upgrading Fund, the "national team" fund such as the China Development Bank, and many investment institutions such as Goldman Sachs and Sequoia China.
Such an AI company that gathers various star investors, the three core figures in the founding team are from Baidu.
Founder and CEO Dai Wenyuan was the youngest Baidu senior scientist. He was the ACM World Champion and in 2007 published a paper by Boosting for Transfer Learning that has so far ranked third in the world in terms of citations in the field of transfer learning.
During his tenure at Baidu, Dai Wenyuan served as the technical leader and de facto trader of Baidu's most important Baidu search advertising (Fengchao) strategy, served as chairman of the commercial product technology committee, and also won the honor of "Best Baidu Person", "Baidu's Highest Award" and million-dollar stock award.
After leaving Baidu in 2013, Dai Wenyuan briefly served at Huawei for a year as the chief scientist of Huawei's Noah's Ark Laboratory, during which he was awarded Huawei's "President Award".
Another co-founder, Chief Research Scientist Chen Yuqiang, was also a Baidu native, and joined hands with Dai Wenyuan to build a successful "Phoenix Nest" system, which increased Baidu's monetization ability by 8 times in 4 years.
Chen Yuqiang studied under Professor Yang Qiang, a top scholar in the field of artificial intelligence, mainly conducting research in the field of transfer learning, joining Baidu after graduating with a master's degree as an architect, and the world's first commercial deep learning system on "Fengchao" was from his hands.
After that, Chen Yuqiang joined Today's Headlines, responsible for news recommendation and information flow advertising algorithms, and established a set of "streaming machine learning system" that supports hundreds of billions of features and hundreds of billions of data.
After leaving today's headlines, Chen Yuqiang co-founded the "Fourth Paradigm" with Dai Wenyuan and others and served as the chief research scientist.
Like Chen Yuqiang, co-founder and chief architect Hu Shiwei joined Baidu after graduating from graduate school (2011).
Hu Shiwei has successively presided over the architecture design of Baidu commercial customer operation, Fengchao emerging monetization, commercial "confidant" search, Aladdin ecology and other core systems.
In 2014, he left the original "comfort zone" and joined the founding team of Linkhome, during his tenure at Linkhome, Hu Shiwei led the team to complete the overall architecture design of the new main station of Linkhome, the new operating system of brokers, and the performance change system, and participated in the planning and promotion of the Internet transformation of the chain home system and R&D system.
The fourth paradigm once told Lei Feng's AI Financial Review that they are committed to promoting the low threshold, standardization and scale of AI, and have carried out in-depth cooperation with a number of banks in the financial field to help them quickly build a data intelligence core system and provide integrated overall solutions including accurate customer acquisition, personalized recommendation, risk control and anti-fraud. At present, it has served many financial institutions such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Bank of Communications, China Merchants Bank and so on.
WeBank - Chen Tianjian
Federal learning has been hot in recent years, and the AI team of WeBank is the first echelon of domestic research.
Among them, the person responsible for the construction of the federal learning technology ecosystem is Chen Tianjian, deputy general manager of the AI department of WeBank, who was also a member of Baidu Finance.
During his time at Baidu, Chen Tianjian was the chief architect of Baidu and the chief architect of Baidu Finance, designing the overall architecture and key systems of Baidu's search, recommendation, big data, finance and other businesses.
He also gave a speech as the chief architect of Baidu Finance, talking about ai Fintech will solve the three pain points of financial customer acquisition, risk control and service.
After joining WeBank, Chen Tianjian was mainly responsible for federal learning and banking intelligence, and he has repeatedly talked about financial data sharing and security solutions based on federal learning.
In addition, Chen Tianjian is also engaged in technical work in many technology companies such as Xunlei and BGI Gene.
Divine Strategy Data - Sang Wenfeng, Liu Yaozhou, Cao Li, Fu Lili
The Shence data, which has been used for more than 1500 enterprises, is similar to the fourth paradigm, and the team also has a strong Baidu color. The four core executives are all from Baidu's big data department and have many years of experience in big data processing.
Chairman Sang Wenfeng, a Baidu veteran, joined Baidu in 2007 and worked for eight years, during which he successively served as software engineer, senior software engineer, project manager, senior project manager, and technical manager.
Perhaps one of the most famous projects on his hands is "Baidu Knows". Sang Wenfeng worked in "Baidu Know" to do research and development, and then began to form and lead a team to achieve the Baidu user log big data platform from zero to one.
In 2015, Sang Wenfeng left Baidu to found Shence Data.
Even after resigning, Sang Wenfeng still has great feelings for Baidu, and he once commented to AI Finance: "I am a soldier trained by Baidu. Baidu has its problems, but Baidu's Silicon Valley way of doing things, engineer culture, and focus on technology are not comparable to other companies. ”
Sang Wenfeng came out to start a business, and the three "partners" he found were all colleagues of Baidu before.
COO Liu Yaozhou is a master of computer application technology from China University of Geosciences. He has worked for Companies such as Sina, Alibaba, and Baidu, and left Baidu in 2015.
CTO Cao Li, a master of computer science from Tsinghua University, worked in Baidu's big data department from 2008 to 2014 as the technical leader of Baidu's user data warehouse (BUDW).
Technical VP Fu Lili, graduated from Beijing Institute of Technology majoring in software engineering, and served as an engineer in Baidu's new product research and development department, web search department and infrastructure department from 2008 to 2013.
At present, Shence Data has provided big data analysis and marketing technology services for more than 1,500 enterprises, including many financial institutions such as China Merchants Bank, Pacific Insurance, and GF Securities.
Ronghui Jinke - Wang Jin, Zhang Yu, Sheng Jun
Wang Jin, who has more than 20 years of risk control experience, can be said to be a risk control veteran. Prior to joining Baidu, he spent 17 years at American Express, known as the "Whampoa Military Academy", where he served as a senior vice president of the operations control business.
In the winter of 2015, Wang Jin joined Baidu Finance as Baidu Finance's first CRO (Chief Risk Management Officer).
In less than a year, Wang Jin's team built the entire risk control system of Baidu Finance, which was successfully launched in October of the following year.
After building Baidu Finance's risk control system, Wang Jin came up with the idea of starting his own business.
In April 2017, Wang Jin joined forces with his old subordinates Zhang Yu and Sheng Jun to found Ronghui Jinke.
Zhang Yu and Sheng Jun are also Senior Executives of Baidu: Zhang Yu was the General Manager of Baidu's Financial Risk Strategy Department/FinTech Department, and Sheng Jun was the General Manager of Baidu's Financial Risk Control Model.
The two founding partners also have a similar growth path to Wang Jin. In Wang Jin's own words, the combined risk control experience of the company's three founders is more than 45 years.
Under the leadership of three major risk control experts in the industry, Ronghui Jinke tailored risk control modules for banks and other financial institutions, and provided a full-process risk control solution of "customer acquisition - pre-loan - loan - post-loan".
From 2018 to 2020, Ronghui Jinke maintained the pace of one round of financing per year, the latest round of financing occurred in June 2020, led by Qantas Telecom, with an amount of 10 million US dollars.
Laiye Technology - Wang Guanchun, Hu Yichuan
The two founders of Laiye Technology have joined hands to start a business twice. After the results of their first venture were acquired by Baidu, the two entered Baidu work one after another.
One of the founders, Wang Guanchun, is a Doctor of Princeton University (machine learning research direction) and has started a business many times. Before joining Baidu, he founded Forrest Gump in 2011.
Another founder, Hu Yichuan, whose development path is very similar to Wang Guanchun's, graduated with a master's degree from Tsinghua University and then went to the University of Pennsylvania to obtain a doctorate in the Department of Electronics and Systems Engineering.
After Hu Yichuan returned to China, together with Wang Guanchun, he founded the film and television recommendation engine "What to See Tonight" in 2012.
Later, "What to See Tonight" was acquired by Baidu, and the two entered Baidu separately. Wang Guanchun became the head of Baidu's chopstick search and intelligent interactive application team, and Hu Yichuan was a senior architect.
In 2015, Wang Guanchun and Hu Yichuan started a business again and founded Laiye Technology.
At present, Laiye Technology has served various industries such as banking, insurance, e-commerce, and government, helping traditional enterprises to digitally transform through RPA+AI software robots.
BISO Technology CEO - Liu Dapeng
In 2017-2020, Bishe Technology received four rounds of financing in four years. The most recent was in October 2020, Bishe Technology completed a 150 million yuan B round of financing, and the shareholder lineup was very dazzling: Sequoia Capital China Fund led the investment, and the old shareholders Gao Rong Capital, Shunwei Capital, Mingshi Capital, and Oriental Fuhai followed suit.
Liu Dapeng, CEO of Bishe Technology, served as a senior software engineer in Baidu's intelligent operation and maintenance department, responsible for the design and development of intelligent operation and maintenance related platforms.
Liu Dapeng is a Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, the inventor of several intelligent operation and maintenance solutions, and has published 8 papers from international academic conferences.
After leaving Baidu, Liu Dapeng co-founded Bishe Technology with Pei Dan and served as the co-founder and CEO of Bishe Technology.
At present, Bishe AIOps products have landed in more than 30 customers such as China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, China Merchants Bank, Everbright Bank, China Minsheng Bank, Guangfa Bank, Chinese Min min bank clearing center, and Everbright Securities, providing support for enterprise operation and maintenance decisions.
Daguan data - Chen Yunwen, Ji Daqi
In addition to Laiye, there is also an RPA vendor, and the founding team is also from Baidu.
In 2015, Chen Yunwen founded Daguan Data and served as CEO. He joined Baidu seven years ago as a core technology R&D engineer at Baidu.
Since then, Chen Yunwen has gone to Shanda, Tencent and other companies to be responsible for big data research and development and team management, researching big data, artificial intelligence and natural language processing.
Chen Yunwen served as its Chief Data Officer (CDO) during his tenure at Shanda Literature and as Senior Director of Tencent Literature and Head of Data Center during his tenure at Tencent.
Daguan Data is a company that focuses on intelligent text processing technology, allowing computers to replace manual business process automation and greatly improve enterprise efficiency. In the financial field, Daguan Data has served many financial institutions such as China Merchants Bank, China Construction Bank, and Ping An.
Chen Yunwen once said to AI Financial Review: "Although the first thing that comes to mind when everyone says that the business landing of artificial intelligence is face recognition, ten years later, the protagonist of the artificial intelligence industry must be text processing technology, as well as various applications combined with RPA, after all, these are the ones that each of us uses in our daily work at all times." ”
Like Chen Yunwen, Ji Dalin, CTO of Daguan Data, has also worked as a research and development engineer at Baidu. Their career trajectories are basically the same, both of them work at Shanda and Tencent, and provide some data mining services.
From 2016 to 2020, Daguan Data received four consecutive rounds of financing. In May 2020, Daguan Data's B+ round of financing received 270 million yuan, led by Shenzhen Venture Capital.
Sea To the Stars - Shi Youcai, Ren Xuyang, Hu Song
Shi Youcai, one of Baidu's start-up team members, joined Baidu in 2001 and is the original builder of Baidu's channel system.
At Baidu, Shi Youcai has served as sales director and vice president, and is one of the pioneers in the field of search engine marketing in China.
In May 2011, Shi Youcai left Baidu to co-found the Haizhi Star Chart. Currently, he serves as chairman of Haizhi Star Chart.
Like Shi Youcai, Ren Xuyang is also one of Baidu's entrepreneurial elders.
As early as December 2001, Ren Xuyang joined Baidu and successively served as the general manager of Baidu Shanghai Branch, the director of Baidu's strategic cooperation department, and the assistant to the president.
In March 2007, Ren Xuyang was appointed as the vice president of marketing and business development of Baidu, responsible for marketing, public relations, investment and mergers and acquisitions, strategic cooperation and business innovation. Since then, he has also served as the chief consultant of Baidu and led the founding of Baidu Capital.
Hu Song is also a Baidu veteran. In 2004, Hu Song joined Baidu and has served as an engineer, project manager, architect and rotating chairman of the technical committee of the web search department.
In 2009, Hu Song participated in the establishment of Baidu Wireless Division and served as the chief architect of the Wireless Division and the technical leader of wireless search products.
Since then, Shi Youcai and Ren Xuyang, Yu Jun, Hu Song and other old Baidu executives have jointly established Tianshan Capital and Haizhi Star Chart.
Haizhixingtu is a big data analysis company focusing on the financial industry, and its core team participated in the development of the world's first Chinese universal knowledge graph platform, and is the pioneer of enterprise knowledge graph.
At present, Haizhi Xingtu has more than 100 employees, the company takes knowledge graph technology as the bottom layer, creates risk control and marketing models, explores the practical scenarios of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and has served financial institutions such as Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and other financial institutions in the field of AI finance.
CEO of Money Cube - Yuan Yulai
Financial Cube is an AI company that mainly focuses on the intelligent investment track, and its founder, Yuan Yulai, was once a key technical figure of Baidu Music.
In September 2013, Yuan Yulai served as the chairman of Baidu Music Technology Committee and a member of the technical committee of Baidu CBG Business Group, building an artificial intelligence music recommendation system for Baidu Music that serves tens of millions of users.
Before joining Baidu, he founded the smart music recommendation platform Yinbei Network and served as CEO.
In 2015, Yuan Yulai founded the robo-advisory app Wealth Management Cube and served as CEO to create a domestic artificial intelligence investment platform, committed to serving middle-class wealth management through AI systems.
Yuan Yulai once told AI Finance: "Unlike other companies in the industry that do "semi-artificial and semi-intelligent investment advisory models", we are the only company in the industry to do "pure artificial intelligence investment advisory system", from the beginning of 17 years to the present, there has not been a second company to launch a "pure artificial intelligence investment model", which we are leading. ”
At present, Wealth Management Cube has received nearly 200 million yuan of investment from a number of well-known investment institutions.
CEO of Zizheng Rubik's Cube - Huang Xinyu
Another company involved in asset securitization, the ABS platform "Capital Evidence Cube", one of the founders of Huang Xinyu, also worked in Baidu for many years.
Huang Xinyu joined Baidu in July 2011, and his main job is the quantitative processing of sales leads, including pre-sales crawler crawlers to crawl leads, after-sales customer loss prevention and voice recognition analysis of customer service systems.
It is worth mentioning that during his work at Baidu, he participated in hackthon (hackathon) races three times and won three awards. And got three chances to have lunch with Robin .com.
In July 2014, Huang Xinyu left Baidu to join Lu Jin and was in charge of the CRM team.
After leaving in January 2016, he and his former colleagues at Lu Jin institute co-founded the "Capital Evidence Cube", and Huang Xinyu became ceo.
AI Financial Review learned that in 2018, Huang Xinyu left the Capital Securities Cube and has now joined Jianxin Jinke.
epilogue
Baidu is like a mature dandelion, as soon as you blow it, the seeds of this entrepreneurial spirit flutter around with the wind.
Every enterprise has its own unique mission and vision, looking back, Baidu's engineer culture, Silicon Valley way of doing things, and the excellence of technology are reaching every industry that the Internet can touch through one entrepreneur after another from Baidu.
These entrepreneurs and AI companies will also become small dandelions to continue to spread these spirits and cultures.
Image source: The movie "The Big Bang Theory"